City Dreaming

Piece by piece, Korea was sold.

Piece by piece, Korea was sold. Beginning in the south of Gyeongseong, what is now Seoul, imperial Japan drove northwards to expand Japanese residential areas in the early 20th Century. Koreans were losing their homes, losing their country, at a table they could not join.

Then, lot by lot, Korea was bought again. 

Ikseondong. Gahoedong. Samcheongdong. Bongikdong. Seongbukdong. 

Jeong Se-gwon, a wealthy Korean developer, bought swathes of land to subdivide the property and devise a solution to the Korean exodus: the city hanok. Neither cramped nor sprawling, the traditional hanok was adjusted for the bursting city and encroaching colonialism. In other words, it became the perfect refuge. 

“People construct houses, and, in turn, houses reconstruct the inhabitants of them.”

The modern hanok sheltered Koreans in an era where no other institution would. The stone blocks, the wooden beams, the papered doors and tiled roofs became the foundation of Korean heritage as much as they structured the homes themselves. The preservation of Korean spaces, Korean neighbourhoods reawakened the inhabitants to their living, breathing culture. 

These clusters of Korean homes between Gyeongbok Palace and Changdeok Palace became the frontlines of resistance: a physical and cultural bulwark against colonial invasion. In time, the area collectively became known as Bukchon – the ‘northern village’ blocking the Japanese advance. 

I spent a day floating around Bukchon, where these houses still stand. Perhaps it has become another commercialised tourist trap with little more to do than commemorate a bygone era and aggravate the remaining residents. Yet I visit Bukchon over and over again in my memories. 

I see a city with curving alleys and deceptive hills. A weightless fog clings to the skyline, tinges shadows blue. I see sparrows cascading like dead leaves and cats enamoured by the warmed giwa. A homecoming and a tourist tracing the history of a Korea under rule. I see houses next to shops, shops next to galleries, and galleries next to homes… 

I come back to Seoul, to Sydney, the same greyscapes with pockets of deliberate design. I say this without a shred of architectural expertise, but something about the concrete blockiness of it all tells me that we’ve lost what it means to build a home. 

A shelter became a house, a house became an apartment, and an apartment became an investment. The objectives of housing have been reduced to turning over a profit and it seems as though nothing but soulless cities will remain. We push out to Riverstone, Marsden Park, and there’s rows upon rows of grey locked into a merchandisable grid. Shreds of green yield to an ever-inflating house, and I’m not even talking about the prices.

House sizes are increasing more than ever to accommodate our growing aversion to asking our neighbours for a pat of butter. The house is no longer a home; it is a cinema and a library, a private pool and a gym, a childcare centre and an office. Houses have evolved into a multifunctional entertainment complex that precludes the need for investment into public spaces. And with that, the realm of community, social interactions, disappears. We retreat to the privacy of our homes because there is no commitment to building for a collective.